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Is the Gay Village a victim of its own success?

The recent cancellation of Fetish Fair has sparked anxiety over whether Toronto's tolerant society has killed the Gay Village.

Crystal Chandelier takes part in the 2008 Fetish Fair, an annual event in the Gay Village. The event for has now been cancelled by the Church-Wellesley Village Business Improvement Area. (COLIN MCCONNELL / TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO)

Liz Devine, co-chair of the Church-Wellesley Village BIA, says the BIA stopped funding the annual Fetish Fair because businesses were losing money during the event. (KEITH BEATY / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

By Kate AllenStaff Reporter

Fri., April 20, 2012

For seven years, the Gay Village’s annual Fetish Fair gave Toronto kinksters a chance to flaunt their leather pride.

The August event brought throngs of jackbooted, whip-wielding, leather-clad revelers to Church St., who met, mingled, and sent Toronto Star photographers home with mostly unprintable evidence.

The Fetish Fair wasn’t for everybody. But that was part of the point: it was a chance for a sexual minority within a sexual minority to assert their identity in public, the way the Pride Parade does for the gay community as a whole.

The Fetish Fair is dead. In January, the Church-Wellesley Village Business Improvement Area (BIA), the main financial backer for the event, decided to pull the Fetish Fair’s funding after a failed attempt last year to sell it as a “village fair.”

“We were looking for ways to become a more neighbourhood-friendly event,” says Liz Devine, BIA co-chair and president of Church St.’s Thomas Cook Rainbow Travel, adding that the fair was not benefitting local businesses.

For the leather and fetish community, the move was a slap in the face, and not the good kind.

“It sort of neutralizes the sexuality of Church St., and I think that is what’s most disturbing about this,” says Jack Pearce, president of Heart of the Flag Federation. HOTF produces Toronto Leather Pride weekend — a series of events, including the nearly two-decade-old Leather Ball, that ran during last year’s fair.

But the Fetish Fair controversy is a proxy battle in a larger tug of war. At the heart of that fight is this question: What is the role of the city’s Gay Village in tolerant 2012?

Pearce worries that the Church-Wellesley neighbourhood, by becoming more palatable to outsiders in a well-intentioned attempt to de-stigmatize homosexuality, is wading so far mainstream as to abandon anyone who might make the average Torontonian squirm.

“The gay community really wants to fit in,” says Pearce. “I don’t think that’s wrong, because we got lots of really great rights. But we’ve sort of left the other side of it” — fetishists, leather daddies, gender non-conformists — “behind.”

Ironically, the BIA says it’s also grappling with being left behind. As outlying neighbourhoods become ever-more welcoming for same-sex couples, gay Torontonians — and their money — are leaving the Village.

“There’s competitive pressure,” says Devine. “The Village is no longer the centre of gay life in Toronto the way it once was.”

And as BIA manager David Wootton told Xtra in March: “Man cannot live on queer dollars alone.”

The battle over Fetish Fair began last year, when the BIA rebranded it as “The Church Street Village Fair: Leather to Lace.” Billing the weekend as a “community event,” the BIA brought in mechanical bulls, a Ferris wheel, and a bouncy castle — efforts met with outrage by the fetish and leather community.

“Do you know how degrading that is? It wasn’t even a big Ferris wheel. It was a kiddie one,” Pearce says. (The BIA described these attractions as “adult games,” and scantily clad grown-ups did use the bouncy castle as a wrestling cage.)

In a display of dissent, the leather community met and marched down Church St. during the fair. Pearce describes that protest — one part of the LGBT community marching on another — as unprecedented.

The BIA’s Devine, however, says last year’s attempt to retool the Fetish Fair had nothing to do with rejecting any sexual subculture. Not only did the fair use up more than half of the BIA’s discretionary spending, it simply wasn’t a boost for local businesses.

“The BIA has a responsibility to all of its community members, and that is what it was trying to do in opening up the event so that more people felt welcomed, and that more people would be participating.” Part of the challenge, Devine says, is that rapid condominium development in the area has brought box stores that squeeze out gay businesses, along with a new demographic profile.

“There’s a need to be reaching out to new residents,” she says, and “constantly evolving the kinds of activities (available) and the refreshing of the image and the look so that people want to come here.”

David Rayside, a professor of political science and sexual diversity studies at the University of Toronto, says that angst over the death of the Gay Village is long-standing and largely overstated.

But the question of whether demographic change is diluting it beyond recognition carries much more weight.

“Is it becoming more respectable and therefore exclusionary? That’s a very good question,” he says, adding that this struggle reflects a larger anxiety.

“The drive to secure (gay) rights — including parenting rights — was widely supported. But there are lots of same-sex couples who have no interest in getting married. There is anxiety that this will reinforce the marginalization of people who cross gender lines, and who are non-conformist in other ways,” he says.

The Gay Village, however, still has a “powerful symbolic role” for Rayside.

“It’s a place that stands for a kind of visibility and assertiveness that remains unique in the city,” he says, including for gay “refugees” from hostile families, towns, and countries.

“There’s still lots of prejudice out there — much more than people realize.”

Pearce says that HOTF will again host Toronto Leather Pride weekend in August.

“I do appreciate all sides of this. I do. Times are a-changing. But they always have been.”

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